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Since the review process is iterative, the reviewer will point out what they consider to be a shortcoming, and the author will fix that part. If they disagree,

Since the review process is iterative, the reviewer will point out what they consider to be a shortcoming, and the author will fix that part. If they disagree, and the author is keen on not mentioning those concerns even as worth considering, but the paper is otherwise good, we could evolve a system whereby the reviewer comment is published along with the paper. > If this is the goal, then perhaps the requirement should be for every paper to be accompanied with an ethical statement which is in no way part of the review process. That would satisfy your needs without risking significant unintentional side-effects, would it not? How do we stop this ethics statement from being vacuous, unless it is reviewed? It might quickly devolve along the lines of TOS/EULA (legalese to include all edge cases) or reduce to something trivial like: No fingers were harmed while typing up this paper.

Kalium 8y ago
> Since the review process is iterative, the reviewer will point out what they consider to be a shortcoming, and the author will fix that part. That takes a non-zero amount of time, and thus funding. So now we've got a system where disagreeing about someone's forecasting of potential social consequences or their decisions around ethics imposes costs on mathematics. Even processes intentionally and explicitly designed to be iterative have an unfortunate tendency to stop iterating as conditions change. This adds one more reason for papers to not reach publication. > If they disagree, and the author is keen on not mentioning those concerns even as worth considering, but the paper is otherwise good, we could evolve a system whereby the reviewer comment is published along with the paper. That sounds like a good idea. In fact, why not just skip the review portion of it and publish reviewer's comments on a paper's ethics along side it every single time? It would seem to get to the same point more quickly! > How do we stop this ethics statement from being vacuous, unless it is reviewed? Here we have the crux of it: the whole point of this proposal is for there to be real consequences attached. Which brings us back to my point about false positives and side effects. I suspect that in most cases, the statements would correctly be vacuous. Many - probably most - papers in computer science have minimal to no obvious or reasonably forseeable social implications.

Kalium 8y ago

> Since the review process is iterative, the reviewer will point out what they consider to be a shortcoming, and the author will fix that part. That takes a non-zero amount of time, and thus funding. So now we've got a system where disagreeing about someone's forecasting of potential social consequences or their decisions around ethics imposes costs on mathematics. Even processes intentionally and explicitly designed to be iterative have an unfortunate tendency to stop iterating as conditions change. This adds one more reason for papers to not reach publication. > If they disagree, and the author is keen on not mentioning those concerns even as worth considering, but the paper is otherwise good, we could evolve a system whereby the reviewer comment is published along with the paper. That sounds like a good idea. In fact, why not just skip the review portion of it and publish reviewer's comments on a paper's ethics along side it every single time? It would seem to get to the same point more quickly! > How do we stop this ethics statement from being vacuous, unless it is reviewed? Here we have the crux of it: the whole point of this proposal is for there to be real consequences attached. Which brings us back to my point about false positives and side effects. I suspect that in most cases, the statements would correctly be vacuous. Many - probably most - papers in computer science have minimal to no obvious or reasonably forseeable social implications.